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Topic: Weird issue with an inverter? (Read 3497 times)

Sometimes I work out of my car. When in the car, I often us a little Asus netbook.

Just recently when switching between vehicles, I forgot the inverter in the car I was not using. As such, I ended buying an inexpensive inverter at Walmart.

I was getting a strange issue where where the response of the touch pad would be jumpy. At first I did not connect the situation to the inverter and I tried cleaning the touch pad real well and even uninstalled and reinstalled the touch pad driver. Nothing helped.

I remembered though that I was hooked up to the wall just the day before and there was no problems. I then tried unplugging the netbook and the issue went away. I had a small power strip, plugged the power strip into the inverter, and then plugged the netbook in. The problem either went away or reduced to a tiny fraction of the problem. I seem to have noticed just the tiniest amount of jumpiness but that could have been in my head.

1. Does anybody know the cause?2. Did probably I do any damage to my netbook?3. Would adding a filter to the inverter help?

« Last Edit: June 19, 2018, 01:44:27 PM by Desert Fox »

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"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."— Robert G. Ingersoll

I know there are issues with inverters specific to using them in cars. I don't know the details, but I suspect it has to do with how the alternator charges the battery. It is possible that some purpose-designed filter might work, as it's probably an issue with the flatness of the DC.

(If I plug my phone in to the car's USB port for charging and headphone port for audio, I get a weird buzz in the audio. If I just use the headphone jack without charging, or while charging from my portable battery charger it's fine, and if I use bluetooth for the audio while charging it's fine, it's only the one combination that is bad.)

"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."— Robert G. Ingersoll

Tried to look up filters and unable to find anything like what I was looking for.As such, I just went ahead and ordered that power supply.

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"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."— Robert G. Ingersoll

Well, I am on my old inverter right now and not having any issues.It really seems to be just that inverter.

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"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."— Robert G. Ingersoll

I received the DC to DC converter and seems to work pretty well. Generates far less heat.

With the power supply of the netbook generating heat and the inverter generating heat, I wonder how much energy is being lost. I know it is something but nobody has been able to quantify it for me.

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"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."— Robert G. Ingersoll

Plenty (I don't have a number either) of energy being lost. I'm trying to remember back to a course I took in 2012, but if I remember right efficiency-wise inverters aren't that bad (ie, DC to AC) but regulators (ie. AC to DC) can be very inefficient - the simplest ones are below 50%. You can get fancy with regulators but you risk failure with fancier components.

It would be nice if there was a way to get a ballpark number of how long it is safe to run such a device off a car battery. I have been unable to ever find anything as a guide however.

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"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."— Robert G. Ingersoll

Yeah that's mostly because it's not really their function, to provide 12VDC continuously for long stretches. Their function is to provide a large current of 12VDC for a short time (for the starter) and then stay continuously charged/charging while the engine is running.

You can get good specs for batteries of that style that are not for cars - in the past I've designed installations where solar panels charge a bank of batteries that superficially look like car batteries, but whose purpose is to provide continuous low-current 12VDC to instruments and devices.

When you work out of your car, you really can't afford to continuously run the car.There is no deep cycle battery available for that purpose however

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"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."— Robert G. Ingersoll

The big issue with car batteries seem to be fully draining them. The idea is that the netbook only draws 33 watts (about half what my Acer laptop uses [65 watts] and about 1/3 of my older Dells [90 watts] used.)If by using a DC to DC converter, I save half the energy, the drain should be maybe 1/6 that of my old Dells. Might not be a major issue even off a car battery.

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"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."— Robert G. Ingersoll